Elections: Doubling Up On Duke

Doubling Up On Duke

Talk about bipartisanship. Until two days before the election, Ben Bagert was the Republican Party's official nominee to run for the Louisiana Senate seat held by three-term Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston Jr. But state representative and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was also in the primary race as a Republican, running a campaign that played on white resentment over affirmative action and welfare. Though polls gave Johnston about half the vote in the Oct. 6 primary, they also showed Bagert, a state senator, badly trailing Duke. That opened up the possibility of a Nov. 6 runoff between the...